Deus Ex: Human Revolution preview: fighting the past

When you play a game this smart, you expect the action to suffer. Luckily, …

When I played the first 10 hours of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the weight of the first game colored my expectations. The original Deus Ex was a PC exclusive—it's sad how quaint that sounds to modern ears—and it was beloved in its time. The game doesn't hold up very well graphically, nor does the voice acting do the game any favors, but it's always viewed through heavily rose-tinted glasses. The sequel had the opposite problem, as it's remembered for being a massive let-down.

So it was tricky to get rid of all that baggage and play Human Revolution on its own terms. We have very good news for fans of the series, though: what we've played captures the feel of the first game, and it plays like how we imagine the original game played the first time. While this is early code and I didn't play the entire game, there was enough here to move the game from curiosity status to "must have now" in my internal list of releases. Let's take a look at why it left such a positive impression.

More human than human

The game takes place before the events of the original Deus Ex, and human augmentation is a contentious topic, with violent protests from a group who thinks we should stay the way we were created. You play as Adam Jensen, a man with a past who now works in private security. After a violent attack, you wake up to find that your body has been outfitted with a variety of upgrades and augmentations. You barely look human anymore, and have suddenly become a very visible example of the fault lines that threaten to tear society apart. In many ways, the character is a throwback to our good buddy J.C. Denton, with a voice to match, but it's all done in a respectful way that helps you remember the first game while enjoying the modern touches.

The setting is familiar to anyone who has seen Blade Runner, and you'll be happy to note that there is a large hub where you can move from mission to mission, talk to characters, do work on the side, or just keep the main story chugging along. How you interact with characters matters, from a conversation before a mission that determines what weapons you'll be given to trying to talk down a violent criminal with a hostage; what you say matters almost as much as what you do.

Shot in the head, and you're to blame, you give augmented humanity a bad name

The problem with this sort of game is how often the action takes a backseat to the conversations and the story. The attitude often seems to be that if the game does the other stuff well, there is some leeway in how well the actual combat delivers. That's not the case here, as the gunplay in Deus Ex: Human Revolution is just as good as the social parts of the game.

I've lately been playing games—including Brink and Section 8: Prejudice—where the enemies seem to be bullet sponges. You can clean out an entire magazine and they'll continue to run away, bloody but alive. The first battle in Deus Ex shocked me when a few rounds pumped into my body caused the load-game screen to come up. The guns in this game do not mess around, and neither do the enemies. In another instance, a bad guy popped up for just a moment, and I put one loud handgun round in his head. He fell down and didn't get up.

You can bring up your weapon to fire using iron sights for added accuracy, and once you begin to beef up your visual augmentations to see where enemies are focused or to catch sight of them through walls, you become something of a killing machine. In the beginning of the game's story you're turned into something that resembles a walking, thinking weapon—and you feel like one.

The enemies are more aggressive than I'm used to from games these days, and they'll move towards your position, gang up on you, and take cover when needed. You can also hold a button to switch to third-person view and hug a wall, allowing you to move under cover and move the camera to get a better view of the action. This makes sense from a gaming standpoint, but wouldn't it be fun to play a game where the camera zoomed in when you took cover, instead of giving you the limited ability to see around walls? It would be a grand trade-off: more security in exchange for less battlefield intelligence.

You can also crouch down and take out enemies with a stealth attack, and you get to determine whether it's lethal or merely a knockout move by the length of time you hold down the button. The problem is that the game pauses for a second before going into a third-person view to play the movie of your takedown. It's odd, and it hurts the pacing of the battle. I felt like the game was taken away from me while I was forced to watch a short movie. We still have plenty of time before launch, so this may be tightened up, but as of now it's one of my few complaints about the game.

We'll be seeing more of this game soon, but from our first extensive preview, this is one to watch. Fans of the first game should be happy—the taste of the second game has been washed from our mouths.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is coming to the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 on August 23. We played the Xbox 360 version.